Customer service or user support services are integral aspects of product use. Consumers depend upon user support services to make effective use of a wide range of products and the ways in which user support is delivered are rapidly expanding. For example, a shopper visiting a retail clothing website may instant message with a user support provider to get additional information about the sizing of clothing or quality of fabric. Prior to the advent of remote user support services, a user would be required to consult with a user support provider in person. The user would thus be limited and potentially inconvenienced by the hours during which the support provider was available for consultation. Furthermore, the user might be required to travel to the professional's physical location. Beyond the inconveniences of scheduling and travel, the user would also be at the mercy of the support provider's ability to communicate effectively and identify the specific support the user needed. All of these factors limited a user's ability to receive meaningful support. Thus, these remote user support services have benefits that face-to-face interactions simply cannot provide because remote user support services do not have limited working hours and are not geographically limited.
Although remote user support services represent a potentially flexible, highly accessible, and affordable source of user support, they do have several significant shortcomings. For example, unlike human professionals providing support, many forms of remote user support services cannot detect, much less adjust to, a user's emotional state and intervene to provide additional or tailored support. Even though a user may be in a certain emotional state when using a product or may have certain responses to a product that change his or her emotional state, user support services are developed in such a way that the user must actually request support. Thus, traditional user support services are fairly passive in that they fail to respond to the specific or changing needs of a user, much less respond to variations in the emotional state of a given user. As a result, a currently available user support service can easily fail to provide responsive, appropriate support. This, in turn, may alienate a user from the product the user support service is attempting to support.
The inability of user support services to proactively intervene to provide support to a user results in users who are unable to take full advantage of the product they are using. Problematically, a user may not even realize that he or she needs support. Users who cannot fully reap the benefits of the product they are using often results in user frustration, and ultimately, in lost customers. This is because, predictably, when users are alienated from or become frustrated with product, they are far more likely to quit using it, which results in lost business.
For example, software systems offering tax return preparation services often present a static, predetermined, and pre-packaged user experience to all users as part of the tax return preparation interview process. These user experiences are typically presented to every user with little or no customization; are typically generated in a static and generic manner; and are typically provided via a combination of user experience components, which include, but are not limited to, interface displays, images, background music, and assistance resources. If a user becomes frustrated or confused with the presented user experience, the user may choose not to seek out, or may not even know about, the user support service supporting the tax return preparation service software system. In that case, the user may abandon the tax return preparation service even though the user support service may have been able to resolve any issue, and is provided for just that purpose.
As another example, if a user does reach out to user support and calls a user support phone number, the user may be routed to a random user support provider at a call center. The user support provider at the call center will likely have no information about the user's emotional state or any information about what specific aspects of the product is causing the user to reach out for help.
Given the consequences of dissatisfied customers, it is in a product provider's best interest to provide a responsive and proactive user support service. What is needed is a method and system for obtaining and analyzing user physiological data to determine whether a user would benefit from user support intervention.